Top Smart Home News Stories For The Week Of June 6, 2019

Google has embraced third-party smart device makers with Bose, Sonos, and Lenovo now including the Google Assistant. A truly smarter home is the promise delivered by RoomMe’s sensor triggers. Control4 is working towards creating a smart home operating system that unites all connected devices. Check out these stories and more in this week’s top smart home news for June 6, 2019.

Up until this point, Hubitat was missing one key element common to most smart-home systems — an app. You had to set up your system in a web browser. You could access that browser from your phone, but Hubitat didn’t have an interface designed for it. The company finally debuted the app for iOS and Android.

Smart home connected devices can control everything from lighting and temperature to security systems and music. But with products from so many different companies, they don’t always work together. Control4 wants to change that.

Fears of a dystopian AI future are also swirling around Amazon’s facial recognition software system Rekognition, which the company reportedly attempted to sell to U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and which has been tested by law enforcement in Washington and Oregon.

After a successful crowd-funding campaign, Intellithings is now offering its $69 RoomMe occupancy sensor to all. When you mount a RoomMe to the ceiling near a room’s entrance, each time you enter the room with your cellphone on your person, the sensor will recognize you and trigger the smart devices in that room.

Google Assistant is now available on select Bose and Sonos smart speakers. Previously, both companies’ smart speakers only supported Amazon’s Alexa. Bose’s integration of Google Assistant follows a similar announcement by Sonos last week that it too would integrate the voice assistant into its lineup of smart speakers.

More than a third of broadband-equipped households now own at least one remotely monitored internet-connected device, with smart speakers outpacing the next most popular categories — thermostats and networked cameras — by a margin of more than three to one, analysts at Parks Associates report.

Privacy is boiling over right now, and perhaps rightfully so. The novelty of big data and better, more addressable content, music, videos, posts, news, and food recommendations may be wearing off just as we realize how much it’s impacting and transforming our daily lives.

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